Guide / where the record lives
Self-hosted inventory management software
Self-hosting means the record lives on your server, patched and backed up by you. Some businesses should absolutely choose that. Here is the honest trade against cloud — and BSimple's stated position as cloud-only.
The key facts
- What self-hosting buys: data on your hardware, no vendor dependency for uptime, and freedom from subscription renewals.
- What it takes: a server, a named maintainer, tested backups, patch discipline, and your own answer to "what happens when it breaks?"
- BSimple's position, stated plainly: cloud-only. There is no on-premise or self-hosted edition, and we will not imply otherwise.
- The honest fork: if data locality or air-gapping is a hard requirement, self-hosted or on-premise tools are the right aisle — not ours.
- 01The key facts
- 02What self-hosting actually buys
- 03What self-hosting takes
- 04BSimple's position, plainly
What self-hosting actually buys
The genuine advantages are about control. Data locality: the database lives where your policy says it must — your office, your rack, your jurisdiction — which matters for contracts, sectors and comfort. Independence: no vendor outage stops the warehouse, no price renewal sets the budget, no roadmap decision removes a feature you depend on. Customisation without permission: the system is yours to extend, and nobody can retire the API you built against.
Those advantages are real, and for businesses with hard data-locality requirements or deep in-house technical teams, they outweigh everything below. The evaluation question is not "is self-hosting good?" — it is whether your organisation can actually staff what it demands.
What self-hosting takes
- A named maintainer. Not "the team", a person: who applies security patches, plans version upgrades, and reads release notes? Departures need handovers.
- A host with tested restores. A server with backups is not the same as backups you have restored from under pressure. Failovers, disks and UPS are your problem now.
- Uptime ownership. When the record is down, trading stops — or runs on memory. Cloud vendors buy redundancy at scale; you will be buying your own.
- An integration budget. Accounting handoffs, scanners, ecommerce — every connection is maintained by you, on your version, on your schedule.
None of this is an argument against self-hosting; it is the price list. The open-source version of this decision covers the licence angle — most self-hosted inventory is open source, and the same ownership costs apply. Self-hosted business management software widens the field beyond inventory.
BSimple's position, plainly
We build BSimple, and it is cloud-only: browser-based, hosted, with no on-premise or self-hosted edition. That is a deliberate trade — what you give up in hardware control, you get back in automatic updates, tested backups that are someone else's job, and a record your team can reach from any device without a VPN. Tenant isolation and the audit trail live on the same infrastructure; your data stays yours and remains exportable through the REST API — cloud hosting is about where the record runs, not who owns the numbers.
If self-hosting is a hard requirement — data locality, air-gapping, internal policy — then the honest recommendation is to shop the self-hosted aisle deliberately, with a maintainer named before the licence is chosen. If it is a preference rather than a requirement, run the comparison where it belongs: on your products, in the trial, against the inventory management category at large.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can BSimple be self-hosted or run on-premise?
No — BSimple is cloud-only, and we state that plainly rather than implying an on-premise edition exists. If locality is a hard requirement, a self-hosted product is the right aisle for you.
Where does our data physically live?
On BSimple's cloud infrastructure, with tenant isolation between businesses. Ask us directly about hosting regions and data handling — those are answerable questions, unlike the claim of self-hosting, which we do not make.
What are the real risks of self-hosting?
Untested backups, delayed security patches, and the maintainer who left without a handover. Each is rare until it is catastrophic; the mitigation is naming people and rehearsing restores, not hoping.
Is cloud or self-hosted cheaper?
Over a few years, self-hosting usually costs more in hours than a subscription does in dollars — unless maintenance is work your team genuinely wants to own. Price the maintainer's time honestly before deciding either way.
Can we export from BSimple if we later self-host?
Your record is yours, and the REST API provides read projections of stock, orders and purchasing for movement in or out. Test the exit during the trial if portability matters to your decision.
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